I've made a start on my 6-film "Chanthology". I think CMM reviewed these on the old board. What did you think of them, admiral?
Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, in which Charlie seeks the killer of a weapons inventor. Amusingly outlandish murders are the highlight. It's fairly striking that a B-movie of this period should have 4 decent(-ish) roles for ethnic minority characters, albeit that one of them is a white guy in yellow-face. The main problem for me is that I didn't like Sidney Toler's monotone delivery as Chan.
Toler is a lot more animated in Charlie Chan in the Chinese Cat (which title conjures up an unfortunate image), in which Charlie is hired to disprove an author's claim that a woman murdered her husband. We've lost Charlie's daughter somewhere between pictures but Benson Fong as Tommy Chan has more to do here as has comedy relief Mantan Moreland. The crime itself is less fun than the previous film but we do get some scenes inside a disused funhouse and that is always a good thing. I enjoyed this one a lot more than the previous film.
As an aside, given that Toler doesn't make for a very convincing Oriental, it's quite startling that he seems to have made a career out of playing them with 21 appearances as Charlie Chan as well as roles as "Wong" and "Kai Lin". I guess if there had been an actual Chinese actor of the right age they could pretty much have cleaned up in Hollywood.
I've made a start on my 6-film "Chanthology". I think CMM reviewed these on the old board. What did you think of them, admiral?
Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, in which Charlie seeks the killer of a weapons inventor. Amusingly outlandish murders are the highlight. It's fairly striking that a B-movie of this period should have 4 decent(-ish) roles for ethnic minority characters, albeit that one of them is a white guy in yellow-face. The main problem for me is that I didn't like Sidney Toler's monotone delivery as Chan.
Toler is a lot more animated in Charlie Chan in the Chinese Cat (which title conjures up an unfortunate image), in which Charlie is hired to disprove an author's claim that a woman murdered her husband. We've lost Charlie's daughter somewhere between pictures but Benson Fong as Tommy Chan has more to do here as has comedy relief Mantan Moreland. The crime itself is less fun than the previous film but we do get some scenes inside a disused funhouse and that is always a good thing. I enjoyed this one a lot more than the previous film.
As an aside, given that Toler doesn't make for a very convincing Oriental, it's quite startling that he seems to have made a career out of playing them with 21 appearances as Charlie Chan as well as roles as "Wong" and "Kai Lin". I guess if there had been an actual Chinese actor of the right age they could pretty much have cleaned up in Hollywood.